Julie Rafalski

In her series Projections, artist Julie Rafalski creates artistic dialogue within her colourful geometric collage. With this intention, she fills her pieces with a variety of old and new references. Her work in many ways is like looking through the index pages in an encyclopedia of modernist art and architecture. In particular, recognisable figures who appear in her work include Mies van der Rohe, Ellsworth Kelly, Yves Klein, Piet Mondrian, Barnett Newman, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin and Alexander Calder.

In her body of work, Rafalski works primarily with collage, drawing and photography. Simultaneously, she explores the relationships between memory, place and time in her geometric collage. Often she uses imagery of Mies van der Rohe’s interiors in these works but, in contrast she overlays them with brightly coloured geometric shapes. These shapes demarcate a superimposed space. Above all, she creates a dialogue between van der Rohe’s architectural language and her chosen forms. With this in mind, these colourful forms are a silhouette outline of an alternative constructed space that could exist within his architecture. At the core of her practice, Rafalski asserts playfulness and deadpan humour in her work.

In line with Rafalski’s collage work, recently we’ve focused on the medium of collage in our UNFRAME articles. We explore the origins of collage as a medium through to contemporary collage today.